Altair Acquires Cambridge Semantics, Powering Next-Generation Enterprise Data Fabrics and Generative AI

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Altair a global leader in computational intelligence, acquired Cambridge Semantics, a modern data fabric provider and creator of one of the industry’s leading analytical graph databases. Cambridge Semantics’ graph-powered data fabric technology accelerates the creation of comprehensive enterprise knowledge graphs, integrating the complex web of structured and unstructured enterprise data together into a single, simplified view.

Bringing together Cambridge Semantics’ transformational knowledge graph technology with Altair’s leading tools for data analytics and data science offers organizations a solid foundation for building advanced analytics ecosystems that inject artificial intelligence (AI) into day-to-day business operations.

“Knowledge graphs are key pieces of data fabrics. They put the right data in the right hands at the right time. We believe Cambridge Semantics brings the fastest and most scalable knowledge graphs to organizations who have significant data volumes and deep questions,” said James R. Scapa, founder and chief executive officer, Altair. “Additionally, knowledge graphs are critical for successful generative AI applications as they provide the business context necessary to ground generative AI models, eliminate hallucinations, and dramatically improve response quality.”

Cambridge Semantics’ technologies will be integrated into the Altair® RapidMiner® platform, adding knowledge graph, data governance, data virtualization, and data discovery technology to the platform’s existing data preparation, ETL, data science, business intelligence, MLOps, workload management, and orchestration tools.

“Joining Altair is a natural transition for Cambridge Semantics as we seek to accelerate the pace of our technology adoption,” said Charles Pieper, chairman and chief executive officer, Cambridge Semantics. “Cambridge Semantics has historically been successful with Fortune 500 government, defense, life science and manufacturing organizations. Bringing Cambridge Semantics to Altair’s broad customer base through the Altair Units business model – and integrating it into Altair RapidMiner – is an exciting prospect for us and for our customers.”

Cambridge Semantics was founded in 2007 by an innovation and engineering team from IBM’s Advanced Technology Group with a shared belief that semantic graph data models were a transformational technology destined to help organizations exploit their data in unprecedented ways: fueling analytics, revealing new insights, and enabling strategically important, competitive differentiation. Its technical team was fundamental to the development of data warehouses IBM Netezza and Amazon Redshift and represents one of the largest single collections of knowledge graph experts in the world.

“This acquisition adds deep data warehousing expertise to our already strong analytics and data science team, creating an enhanced core group of engineers that understand the entire data lifecycle – from data creation to real impact,” said Srikanth Mahalingam, chief technology officer, Altair. “We are all excited about where this combined team and technology will take us.”